Kara Walker: Freedom: A Fable. With Offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes on wove paper. Pop-up design by David Eisen. Privately published by the Peter Norton Family, 1997. Unpaged (25 pp). Small quarto. Edition of 4000. Bonded leather boards with Norwegian finish.

An astonishing artists book from relatively early in Walker's career! Rarely comes to market!
"Each year since 1988, rather than sending out a holiday card, [the collector and software entrepreneur Peter Norton] has commissioned an artist to create an edition - usually the sculptural objects or books known as "multiples"...
As the best multiples tend to do, each Norton project typically provides a smart twist on the artist's previous work. One example is the 1997 Christmas gift by Kara Walker, known for her flat wall installations of cut-paper silhouettes in black that pinpoint the nuances of the antebellum South. Her Norton project was a pop-up book called "Freedom: A Fable," which illuminates the dreams of "a soon-to-be-emancipated 19th-century Negress" using 3-D cut-paper constructions."--Carol Kino, NY Times

"Kara Walker first came to art world attention in 1994, when she was 24, with her mural at the Drawing Center in SoHo. It was a narrative panorama with a long, goofy, old-timey title: 'Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.' And it was made in an unusual way, from black-paper silhouette figures cut by hand and affixed to the gallery wall. It was a danse infernal of sex, slavery and chitlin-circuit comedy. "Gone" was an instant hit....Several African-American artists with careers dating from the 1960s publicly condemned Ms. Walker's use of racial stereotypes as insulting and opportunistic, a way to ingratiate herself into a racist white art industry. In 1997 one of these artists tried to organize a museum boycott of her art. Ms. Walker responded with a vehement outpouring of diaristic drawings titled "Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk?" Some are text-heavy, direct-address and issue-specific: "What you want: negative images of white people, positive images of blacks." Others are angry, funny, obsessive notes to self, examining race, racism, her own racism, her rejection of it and her dependence on it from many angles and various personas." -- Holland Cotter, NY Times